Issue06

INTERVIEW | Stepan Ryabchenko

INTERVIEW | Stepan Ryabchenko

Stepan Ryabchenko is a leading Ukrainian media artist and Art Laboratory chief curator. His work spans conceptual architecture, sculpture, and light installations. He focuses on the boundary between the real and virtual world and the new nature of art. Stepan creates his digital universe with its heroes and mythology. Well-known for his monumental prints and video-art installations of non-existent characters, including Computer viruses, Electronic winds, Virtual flowers, etc.

INTERVIEW | Lab212 Collective

INTERVIEW | Lab212 Collective

Lab212 is an interdisciplinary art collective, founded in 2008 in Paris by friends who all graduated in Media & Interaction Design at Les Gobelins Paris. Using new media, the collective creates installations that explore Lab212 Collective’s perceptions of space and sound provoke a loss of bearings and offer a sensitive interpretation of impalpable phenomena by giving them materiality as through light and sound beams in space Passifolia, 2020.

INTERVIEW | Roberto Cuellar

INTERVIEW | Roberto Cuellar

Roberto Cuellar fuses elements of design and pop culture with a sculptural and scenographic approach to create free-standing sculptures, installations, and reliefs. Cuellar has been collaborating with various international artists and leading skate brands. His works associated with skateparks and store windows of famous luxury brands have been settings to diverse music and skateboarding videos while remaining visible in the public space.

INTERVIEW | NAOWAO

INTERVIEW | NAOWAO

Tokyo-based media artist Nao Sakamoto, known as NAOWAO, With a background in filmmaking, interior architecture, visual effects, and animation. She explores hybrid worlds between the physical and the digital. NAOWAO creates a story that invites the viewer to explore another perspective of the current world. She questions the meaning of authenticity and how our digital life is affecting it.

INTERVIEW | Manuel Delgado Meroño

INTERVIEW | Manuel Delgado Meroño

Flor de Placebo is a photo-poetic project developed in April 2020, during the quarantine period. It represents different ways of facing confinement when exiled from nature. In addition, Flor de Placebo reflects on the importance of art during the most difficult moments of any human being and the crucial yet subtle relationship of people with their natural surroundings.

INTERVIEW | Tomoki Uematsu

INTERVIEW | Tomoki Uematsu

Tomoki Uematsu is a Japanese Artist who interprets the sense of subconsciousness experienced by meditation and qigong as emotional memory memorized in the body and expresses the micro and macro world view from the cells of the body to the universe using the motif of nature in the world of surrealism. All work steps are improvised in order to give an intuitive sense of subconsciousness.

INTERVIEW | Vicky Martin

INTERVIEW | Vicky Martin

Vicky Martin explores her fascination with identity and the emotions created by considered scenarios based on both fantasy and reality. Her work explores identity through staging and creating realities for characters who often display conflicting emotions with situations. Vicky seeks to encourage the viewer to ask questions of her work to which ultimately, the answers depend on the viewer's identity and perceptions.

INTERVIEW | Nick Metz

INTERVIEW | Nick Metz

Nick Metz is focused on the role of masculinity in society and what “compromises” masculinity. What traditionally “feminine” actions or objects impact virility? What makes a man a man? Who/What determines masculinity? Why does society label and condemn men who step outside the general guidelines of masculinity? Metz explores these concepts and themes throughout his work in light of his own experiences and quandaries with these models.

INTERVIEW | Lexi Sun

INTERVIEW | Lexi Sun

Lexi Sun is a Chinese born multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and art director based in Berlin. Lexi senses rhythm and repetition as the rhizome of her art practice. Throughout her practice, combining installation, performance, photography, moving image, and sound, she explores the rhythm of folding, unfolding, and refolding the repetition.

INTERVIEW | Christina Michalopoulou

INTERVIEW | Christina Michalopoulou

Christina Michalopoulou’s paintings are figurative, realistic human figures, and body parts in surrealistic environments. Christina often likes to bring realism, sometimes even photorealism, of her figures contrasting with an abstract, pop, or fictional background—a play of surrealism resemblance to a collage.

INTERVIEW | Carmel Ilan

INTERVIEW | Carmel Ilan

Carmel Ilan is an obsessive collector of abandoned texts. This no man's land of abandoned books is an interesting position for her to start. Working with paper requires attention to the delicacy, crispness, and fragility of the material. Carmel’s images grow out of folded fields of paper. Reading is transformed into observation. The papers, carriages of text, preserve the material memory from which they came, and at the same time, grow into a new language.

INTERVIEW | Jenny Day

INTERVIEW | Jenny Day

Jenny Day (1981) is a painter who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. How many ways can one approach mourning? Jenny Day has tried to jest at it, deconstruct it, cover loss in trashy glamour and glitter, and reassemble it, so the source material is only hinted at—an assemblage of Instagram snippets and sad wry and sour jokes and heartbreak.

INTERVIEW | Salvatore Esposito

INTERVIEW | Salvatore Esposito

Contemporary Art Magazine, Interview. Salvatore Esposito is an Italian artist based in London, UK. Salvatore tends to use upcycled material in almost all his works, trying to picture an abstract urban view without human- being direct presence; though what remains is still the sign of his/her interventions.

INTERVIEW | Iván Cáceres

INTERVIEW | Iván Cáceres

Often referencing European history, Ivan Cáceres’ work explores the varying relationships between forms, geometries, and composition that shape the places we live in. His compositions are usually frontal, geometrical, from a certain distance, assuming a neutral position. Historical memory and disappearance are issues that are always present in Cáceres’ photos.

INTERVIEW | Peter Horvath

INTERVIEW | Peter Horvath

Peter Horvath is a photo-based and New Media artist who was born in Toronto, Canada. Merging street ephemera, movie posters, photographs, ink and spray paint, Horvath's densely layered assemblage portraits reflect his fascination with media consumption, cultural icons, and urban decay. He shares an affinity with the Décollage of the 1960's Nouveau Réalistes Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé.

INTERVIEW | Webson Ji

INTERVIEW | Webson Ji

The exploration of the essence of materiality is the driving force throughout Webson Ji's artistic career. His background as a competitive swimmer during his youth contributes to his perspective on water's nature and movement. As such, Ji's practice focuses on presenting this substance, combining it with various industrial materials to present the viewer with a unique interpretation of his meditation.

INTERVIEW | Aodan

INTERVIEW | Aodan

As an artist working mainly with porcelain and embroidery, Aodan strives to explore, redefine and externalize femininity and “femaleness”. With highly detailed and intricate techniques, she endeavors to show the complicated tableaux with aggressiveness, gentleness, fragility, softness, toughness, struggles, emotions, and pain within femininity and female gender in delicate and cryptic looks.